Why Your Parser Should Keep the Whitespace

A compiler can throw away whitespace, but a formatter, linter autofix, refactoring tool, static analyzer, and LSP server can’t.

Once you’ve built the second tool on a lossy tree you’ll write a second parser, and then they’ll conflict at an inconvenient time.

If you track the whitespace from the beginning, the tree gets a little bigger, but every downstream tool gets to share a unified frontend.